Otto Schmidt (politician, 1902)

Otto Anton Ferdinand Herbert Schmidt (born August 1, 1902 in Cologne ; † December 12, 1984 in Sinzig ) was a German CDU politician . He was the Lord Mayor of Wuppertal and a long-time member of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia and the German Bundestag.

Life

Otto Schmidt was born as the eldest of four children of the publisher Otto Schmidt senior and his wife Berta Schmidt († 1955). After studying law and economics at the universities of Rostock , Leipzig , Munich and Cologne , he became a court trainee in 1924 . In 1925 received his doctorate he became Dr. jur. , and in 1928 he became a court assessor . From 1928 he also worked as an authorized signatory together with his father in his publishing house, the Dr. Otto Schmidt , and even rose to become a co-owner in 1940. From 1930 he also worked as a lawyer in Cologne. In 1944 he was called up for military service and fought as a soldier in World War II, which his father did not survive. Schmidt was taken prisoner after the end of the war.

politics

Schmidt came into contact with politics early on. His father, a monarchist, was one of the founders of the German Fatherland Party and also one of the founders of the German National People's Party in Cologne after the First World War. His father was a member of the Pan-German Association , which propagated Pan-Germanic-Völkisch nationalism. Otto Schmidt joined the Pan-German Association in 1927, to which he belonged until 1932. Three years earlier Schmidt had already joined the Völkisch-Sozial Block , a party approved by the British occupation authorities in Cologne. Schmidt justified his political attitude with the "unfortunate circumstances (n) of the year 1923/24 (Ruhreinmarsch, inflation)", which (triggered) a "völkisch attitude in (him)." After the Völkisch-Sozial bloc was re-founded in 1925 The NSDAP had risen, Schmidt withdrew from it. In 1933, Schmidt stood up as a party candidate for the NSDAP in the völkisch thought. Two years later, however, he refused to take the oath on Adolf Hitler and decided not to join the party. In 1934 Schmidt joined the Confessing Church , which opposed the ecclesiastical views of the National Socialist regime. Schmidt served as a medic in the replacement and training department from 1944 to 1945.

After the end of the war, Otto Schmidt jun. Released early from prisoner-of-war and immediately set about rebuilding the publishing house. Moved by the impressions of the war, Schmidt decided to transfer the management of the company to Helmut Simons. He was a member of the so-called Wuppertal Circle and helped found the Christian Democratic Party on September 2, 1945 in Cologne, which was renamed the CDU Landesverband Rheinland in December. At a board meeting of the CDU regional association Rhineland on February 5, 1946 in Uerdingen , he was elected second chairman of the party executive under Konrad Adenauer . From 1946 he worked as a lawyer in Wuppertal.

Schmidt was elected Lord Mayor of the city of Wuppertal on November 2, 1948 and remained so for exactly one year until November 2, 1949. Since September 15, 1950, he was Minister of Reconstruction in the North Rhine-Westphalian cabinet of Karl Arnold in the second electoral term . On October 1, 1953, his department was merged with the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Social Affairs and he was appointed Minister of Labor, Social Affairs and Reconstruction . On July 27, 1954, he was not reappointed to the government, but was still a member of the third state parliament in North Rhine-Westphalia. From 1957 to 1972 he was a member of the German Bundestag ("Schmidt-Wuppertal"). In the federal elections in 1957 and 1961 he won the direct mandate in the constituency Wuppertal I . He was also the longstanding chairman of the finance committee and co-chairman of the mediation committee and chairman of the interparliamentary working group.

Honors

• In 1979 Otto Schmidt was awarded the ring of honor of the city of Wuppertal .
• 1962 Large Federal Cross of Merit with star and shoulder ribbon
• 1968 Large gold medal with star for services to the Republic of Austria

See also

Arnold II cabinet

Web links

• Internet presence of the publisher
• Photo by Otto Schmidt jun.
• Otto Schmidt at the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia
• Kim Wambach: Otto Schmidt (Konrad Adenauer Foundation)

swell

• Wuppertal city archive
• Who's Who on the Rhine and Ruhr 1963/64
• International Biographical Archive
• Who is who? 1984
• WZ dated December 14, 1984
• Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 2: N-Z. Attachment. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , pp. 758-759.
• Otto Schmidt in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Individual evidence

1. ^ History 1929 - 1933 ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ See the entry of Otto Schmidt's matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
3. ^ History 1945 - 1948 ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ Quotation from Kim Wambach: Otto Schmidt, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , accessed on April 4, 2020.
5. ↑ Kim Wambach: Otto Schmidt, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung , accessed on April 4, 2020.
6. ↑ www.werner-steinbach.de ( Memento from February 21, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) List of bearers of the ring of honor of the city of Wuppertal, accessed May 2008